Our Game (21 page)

I heard it before I saw it: Emma's antique jewellery, rattling and skidding down the table at me, every piece I had bought for her since my first timid offering of a pair of Victorian jet earrings, graduating by way of the three-string pearl collar to the intaglio necklace, the emerald ring, the garnet pendant, and the gold-backed cameo that could have been of Emma herself—all slewed down the table at me like so much dross by the inexpert hand of Detective Inspector Bryant.

I was standing. The jewels lay along the table like a trail, and the trail ended with me. I must have got up quickly, because Luck was standing also, blocking my path to the door. I picked up the intaglio necklace and ran it fearfully through my fingers as if to confirm it was unharmed, though in my mind it was Emma I was touching. I turned her cameo over, then her brooch, her pendant, finally the ring. A babble of Office buzzwords went through my head: linkage ... spillage

interconsciousness. Keep her separate from Larry, I was telling myself. Whatever they do or threaten: Emma stays separate from Larry.

I sat down.

"Recognise any of these items at all by any chance, do we, Mr.-Cranmer-sir?" Bryant was asking benignly, like a conjuror who had performed a clever trick.

"Of course I do. I bought them."

"Who from, sir?"

"Appleby of Wells. How did you come by them?"

"On what precise date did you purchase them, if you don't mind, from Messrs. Appleby of Wells? We do know you're a trifle weak on dates overall, but—"

He got no further. I had driven my fist onto the table so hard that the jewellery danced and the tape recorder rose in the air and turned belly-up as it landed.

"Those jewels are Emma's. Tell me where you got them from. Stop taunting me!"

It is a rare thing when emotion and operational necessity coincide, but they had done so now. Bryant had shed his smile and was studying me with calculation. Perhaps he thought I was about to offer him my confession in exchange for her. Luck sat upright, craning his long head at me.

"Emma?" Bryant repeated thoughtfully. "I don't think we know an Emma, do we, Oliver? Who would Emma be, sir? Perhaps you could enlighten us."

"You know very well who she is. The whole village knows. Emma Manzini is my companion. She's a musician. The jewels are hers. I bought them for her and gave them to her."

"When?"

"What does it matter when? Over the last year. On special occasions."

"Foreign, is she?"

"She had an Italian father, who is dead. She is British by birth and was brought up in England. Where did you find them?" I resorted to a wistful fiction. "I'm her common-law husband, Inspector! Tell me what's going on."

Bryant had put on horn-rimmed spectacles. I don't know why they should have shocked me, but they did. They seemed to drain his eyes of the last dregs of human kindliness. His moth-eaten moustache had turned downward in an angry sneer.

"And is Miss Manzini in any way friendly with our Dr. Pettifer at all, Mr. Cranmer, sir?"

"They've met. What does it matter? Just tell me where you got her jewellery from!"

"Prepare yourself for a shock, Mr. Cranmer, sir. We obtained your Emma's jewels from Mr. Edward Appleby of the Market Place in Wells, the selfsame gentleman as sold you the said treasures in the first place. He tried to contact you, but your phone had gone funny. So, fearing the matter might be urgent, he reported it to the Bath police, who, being somewhat short-handed at the time, took no further action." He had awarded himself the role of storyteller. "Mr. Appleby is doing his rounds of Hatton Garden, you see, calling on his jeweller friends, which is his way. All of a sudden one of them turns round and, knowing that Mr. Appleby deals in the antique variety of jewellery, offers him your Miss Manzini's necklace—the Roman number, what do they call it? By your left hand there."

"Intaglio."

"Thank you. And after offering Mr. Appleby the entirely-o, he offers him the whole works. Everything you see before you. Is that everything you bought for Miss Manzini, sir—the full collection?"

"Yes."

"And since all dealers know each other, Mr. Appleby asks him where he got the stuff from. The answer is a Dr. Pettifer of Bath. Twenty-two thousand pounds the Doctor obtained for his jewels. Family heirlooms they were, according to him. Inherited from his old mother, now alas passed on. That's a fair price for this lot, is it—twenty-two thousand pounds?"

"It was a trade price," I heard myself say. "They were insured for thirty-five."

"By you?"

"The jewels are recorded as being in Miss Manzini's possession. I pay the premiums."

"Has any claim been made at all to an insurance company for the loss of these jewels?"

"Nobody knew they were missing."

"You mean you didn't. Could the Doctor or Miss Manzini have made a claim on your behalf'?"

"I don't see how. Ask the insurance company."

"Thank you, sir, I will," said Bryant, and wrote down the name and address from my diary. "The Doctor wanted cash for his old mother's legacy, but the shop in Hatton Garden couldn't do that for him," he resumed in his false-friendly voice. "Regulations, you see, sir. The best they could manage was a cheque made out to cash because he said he hadn't got a bank account. The Doctor then pops up the road and presents it at the jeweller's bank, collects his loot, and is seen by the jeweller no more. Left his full name behind, though; he had to. Verified by his driving licence, which is rather amusing, considering how many points it's got against it. Address Bath University. The jeweller rang the registrar's office for verification: yes, we have a Mr. Pettifer."

"When did all this happen?" I said.

How he loved to torture me with his knowing smiles. "That really bothers you, doesn't it," he said. "When. You can't remember dates, but you're always asking when." He made a show of relenting. "The Doctor flogged your lady's jewellery on July twenty-ninth, a Friday."

Which was roughly when she stopped wearing it, I thought. After Larry's public lecture, and the curry for two that did or didn't follow it.

"Where is Miss Manzini, by the way?" Bryant asked.

I had my answer prepared and delivered it with authority. "When last heard of, somewhere between London and Newcastle on a concert tour. She likes to travel with the group that plays her music. She's their guiding spirit. Where she is at this precise moment, I don't know. It's not our way to be in constant touch. I'm sure she will telephone me very soon."

Now it was Luck's turn to have his fun with me. He had opened another package, but it seemed to contain nothing but inky notes he had written to himself. I wondered whether he was married and where he lived—if he lived anywhere outside the shiny, disinfected corridors of his trade.

"Did Emma happen to inform you that her jewellery was missing at all?"

"No, Mr. Luck, Miss Manzini did not."

"Why not? Are you trying to tell us your Emma's been shy of thirty-five thousand quid's worth of jewellery for a couple of months and hasn't even bothered to mention it?"

"I'm saying Miss Manzini may not have noticed that the jewels were missing."

"And she's been around, has she, these last months? I mean around you. It's not that she's been touring all that time."

"Miss Manzini has been at Honeybrook throughout the entire summer."

"Nevertheless you did not have the smallest inkling that one day Emma had her jewellery, and the next day Emma was without it."

"None whatever."

"You didn't notice that she wasn't wearing the stuff, for instance? That might have been a clue, mightn't it?"

"Not in her case."

"Why not?"

"Miss Manzini is capricious, like most artists. One day she will appear in her finery, then whole weeks can go by when the notion of wearing something valuable is anathema to her. The reasons can be many. Her work—something has depressed her—she is in pain from her back."

My reference to Emma's back had produced a pregnant silence.

"Injured, was it, her back?" Bryant enquired solicitously. "I'm afraid it was."

"Oh dear. How did that happen, then?"

"I understand she was manhandled while taking part in a peaceful demonstration."

"There could be two views about that, though, couldn't there?"

"I'm sure there could."

"Bitten any more policemen recently, has she?"

I refused to answer.

Luck resumed. "And you don't ask her: Emma, why aren't you wearing your ring? Or your necklace? Or your brooch? Or your earrings ... for instance?"

"No, I don't, Mr. Luck. Miss Manzini and I don't speak to each other that way."

I was being pompous and knew it. Luck had that effect on me.

"All right. So you don't talk to each other," he blurted. "Same as you don't know where she is." He appeared to be losing his temper. "All right. In your highly personal, highly privileged Treasury opinion, how does your friend Dr. Lawrence Pettifer, in July this year, come to be flogging off your Emma's jewellery at two-thirds what you gave for it, to a dealer in Hatton Garden, claiming the jewels came from his mother, when in fact they came from you, via Emma?"

"The jewellery was Miss Manzini's to dispose of as she wished. If she had given it to the milkman I could not have raised a finger." I saw a means to strike at him and seized it gratefully. "But surely your Mr. Guppy has already provided you with your solution, Mr. Luck?"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Wasn't it July when Guppy claims he saw Pettifer approach my house? A Sunday? There's your burglar for you. Pettifer approaches the house and finds it empty. On Sundays there are no staff around. Miss Manzini and I have gone out for lunch. He forces the window, enters the house, goes to her apartment, and helps himself to the jewellery."

He must have guessed that I was teasing him, for he had coloured. "I thought you said Pettifer didn't steal," he objected suspiciously.

"Let's say you have given me reason to revise that opinion," I replied suavely as the tape recorder gave a choke and stopped rotating.

"Leave it like that a minute, will you, please, Oliver," Bryant ordered sweetly.

Luck had already reached out to change the tape. Now, somewhat ominously, I thought, he removed his hand and laid it beside its companion on his lap.

"Mr. Cranmer, sir."

Bryant was standing close beside me. He had cupped his hand on my shoulder in the traditional gesture of arrest. He was stooping, and his lips were not an inch from my ear. I had forgotten physical fear till now, but Bryant was reminding me of it.

"Do you know what this means, sir?" he asked me, very quietly, as he gave my shoulder a painful squeeze.

"Of course I know. Take your hand off me."

But his hand didn't budge. The pressure of it increased as he continued speaking.

"Because this is what I'm going to be doing to you, Mr. Cranmer, sir, unless I have a lot more of the collaboration I spoke about than I am getting from you at the present time. If you don't play ball with me very soon, I'm going to fake any pretext, bend any evidence, as the old song goes, and I'm going to make it my personal business to see you spend the remaining best years of your life looking at a very boring wall instead of at Miss Manzini. Did you hear that, sir? I didn't."

"I can hear you perfectly well," I said, trying in vain to shake off his hand. "Let go of me." But he held me all the more firmly.

"Where's the money?"

"What money?"

"Don't 'what money' me, Mr. Cranmer, sir. Where's the money you and Pettifer have been salting away in foreign bank accounts? Millions of it, the property of a certain foreign embassy in London."

"I've no idea what you're talking about. I have stolen nothing, and I am not in league with Pettifer or anybody else."

"Who's AM?"

"'Who?"

"AM who's all over Pettifer's diary in his lodgings. Phone AM Brief AM Visit AM"

"I have absolutely no idea. Perhaps it means morning. And PM means afternoon."

I think in a different place he would have hit me, for he lifted his eyes to the mirror as if appealing for permission. "Where's your pal Checheyev, then?"

"Who?"

"Don't give me bloody who again. Konstantin Checheyev is a Russian cultural gentleman, formerly of the Soviet, then Russian, embassy in London."

"I've never heard the name in my life."

"Of course you haven't. Because what you are doing to me, Mr. Cranmer, sir, is lying in your nasty upper-class teeth, whereas you should be assisting me in my enquiries." He squeezed my shoulder and pressed down on it at the same time, sending lines of pain shooting through my back. "Do you know what I think you are, Mr. Cranmer, sir? Do you?"

"I don't give a damn what you think."

"I think you're a very greedy gentleman with a lot of arrogant appetites to feed. I think you have a little friend called Larry. And a little friend called Konstantin. And a little gold digger called Emma, who you spoil rotten, who thinks the law's an ass and policemen are there to be bitten. And I think you play Mr. Respectable, and Larry plays your little lamb, and Konstantin sings along with some very naughty angels in the Moscow choir, and Emma plays your piano. What was that I heard you say?"

"I didn't speak. Get off me."

"I distinctly heard you insulting me. Mr. Luck, did you hear this gentleman using insulting language to a police officer?"

"Yes," said Luck.

He shook me hard and shouted in my ear. "Where is he?”

“I don't know!"

The pressure of his fist did not relent. His voice dropped and became confiding. I could feel his hot breath in my ear.

"You are at a crossroads in your life, Mr. Cranmer, sir. You can play ball with Detective Inspector Bryant, in which case we shall turn a blind eye to many of your misdeeds, I'm not saying all. Or you can go on leading us up the garden path, in which case we shall not exclude from our enquiries any person who is precious to you, be she never so young and musical. Were you shouting filth at me again, Mr. Cranmer, sir?"

"I said nothing at all."

"Good. Because your lady shouts it, according to our records. And her and me are going to be chatting quite a lot in the near future, and I won't have bad manners, will I, Oliver?"